Bernardo Vizcaino wonders what drove Ibn Battuta's passion for travel! He compares the 14th century Moroccan Judge and legal scholar journey to that of Islamic Banking & Finance in the 20th century!  Ibn Battuta sets out at age 21 on his first Hajj pilgrimage.  Instead of completing his pilgrimage and returning back to his hometown, he ends up traveling all over the world.  A three decades worth of travels takes him through North Africa into Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Persia, Turkey, Maldives, India, China, and Spain before he finally goes back home. 

So, what is common between Ibn Battuta and Islamic Banking & Finance! According to Bernardo, the span of their journey covering the farthest corners of the world; passion for new discoveries and unending wonder of what might lie ahead; a world of uncertainty and foreign world's culture shocks; basking in obscurity and living on the sidelines of history for a long time until accidentally discovered by chance! 

These are interesting commonalities.  However, I would like to add another common factor Bernardo forgot to add or he may have missed.  Both Ibn Battuta and Islamic Banking & finance face doubts about the authenticity of their accounts.   Is Islamic Banking & Finance authentic or is it another form of conventional banking with a hefty Shari'ah markup! Is it really Islamic or is it a new form of finance masquerading under the guise of ancient Islamic contract names to confer legitimacy in the eyes of the faithful! The question of Islamic Banking & Finance authenticity is hotly debated as is the accounts of Ibn Battuta travels. 

And yet despite the debate regarding value, origin, and authenticity, Islamic Banking & Finance shares yet another common factor with Ibn Battuta! It is one of the most popular form of finance and the fastest growing in the world!  It is also being approached by many with ever increasing curiosity, expanding desire to better learn and understand its nature and its past, current, and future journey.  It is also approached with a rising desire by many to gain the riches of its oppertunities through improved understanding of its nature.  We can join the crowed and wonder too ... but really, at the end of the day Islamic Banking and Finance is just another form of financial business that will merit its legitimacy in the world of business by virtue of providing standardized product offering, progressive risk management, consistent interpretation of Shari'ah, and competitive market adoption.   

Today the clock fell back one hour here in the USA! A debate raged in my household between my son and spouse regarding if we in fact gained or lost an hour.  And recently I have been talking to friends about the Mayan Calendar and how according to that calendar the world is supposedly coming to an end in 2012! And I have been reading recently a lot on Islamic banking and finance topics in which texts continually reference, compares and contrasts, dates from the Gregorian and Islamic Calendar.   These calendar and data/time encounters got me interesting in learning more about both the Gregorian and the Islamic calendars.  The BH, AH, BC, AD and a whole lot of two letter designations and gaps in years got me totally confused.  So here is what I found so far and I hope it help you folks who cross between two worlds (maybe more!)

To find a frame of reference on where do we really stand today in this very moment (what is the date, time, and in reference to what exactly), we always need an absolute moment in time to serve as the relative reference.  This might be a simplistic or even moronic post ...but for me, I need to STOP my own confusion and learn about these calendars frame of reference and how they compare or differ.  So here is what I learned this morning:

Islamic Calendars: We awe it to Caliph Umar and to an event that occurred in 638 which corresponds to 17 years after Prophet Muhammad Hijra (flight) to Medina from Kaaba.  Abu-Musa al-Sha'ari complained to Umar about his lack of ability to reference the correspondence he is receiving (instructions) to a date so that he would know what came first or last.   This complaint and the overall expansion of the Islamic world and the need to make sure all Islamic posts get dated correspondence convinced Umar an Islamic Calendar is necessary.   He debated with his advisers, consulted, discussed, and finally he decided to start the Islamic Calendar with the year of Muhammad's Hijra to Medina.  Though Umar choose the year of the Hijra, he did not start the year on the date of Hijra itself which happened in September.  He started the Islamic Calendar on July 16, 622 C.E which corresponds to Muharram, the first month of the year by Arab custom at the time.  On this day of Muharram 1, 1 A.H Muslims began their calendar count and today November 1, 2009 is considered the 13th of al-Qi`dah 1430 A.H in the Islamic world.  The conversion calculator has one day error margin, however.  If you would like to play with dates and conversions in an islamic calendar try this site: http://www.islamicfinder.org/Hcal/hdate_gr.php.  The reason why you need a conversion calculator is there is no fixed translation relationship between the Gregorian months and the Islamic months. 

The calculation depends on the moon and astronomy and a whole lot of complicated things I can not claim to understand.  So Muharram could happen in June or September or December or any other month over the course of time depending on the Islamic Calendar date.  And this may explain why Ramadan does not always come on the same month of the Gregorian Calendar.  It keeps on moving in reference!   The moon is to blame for this complication! The Gregorian calendar is fixed on the solar system.  The Islamic Calendar follows the moon and each month's start is observed when the crescent appears at the beginning of each Islamic month. 

Here are the months in the Islamic Calendar:

1. Muharram محرّم (or Muḥarram al Ḥaram)
2. Safar صفر (or Ṣafar al Muzaffar)
3. Rabi' al-awwal (Rabī' I) ربيع الأول
4. Rabi' al-thani(or Rabī' al Thānī, or Rabī' al-Akhir) (Rabī' II) ربيع الآخر أو ربيع الثاني
5. Jumada al-awwal(Jumādā I) جمادى الاول
6. Jumada al-thani(or Jumādā al-akhir) (Jumādā II) جمادى الآخر أو جمادى الثاني
7. Rajabرجب (or Rajab al Murajab)
8. Sha'abanشعبان (or Sha'abān al Moazam)
9. Ramadanرمضان (or Ramzān, long form: Ramaḍān al Mubarak)
10. Shawwalشوّال (or Shawwal al Mukarram)
11. Dhu al-Qi'dah ذو القعدة
12. Dhu al-Hijjah

 

I attended a few conferences lately where the question on why the CIO or the CTO is not sitting at the CEO table.  There were many theories and explanations.  There were many funny pictures of the jargon ridden CIO that is always bewildering his colleagues with SOAP, Orchestration, SOA, XML, Cloud, and Virtualization!  Pictures of suffering CEO's whose heads are filled with financial numbers, profit margins, ROI, PE ratios, and market strategies were plastered on the big screens with the CIO way in the background with his head swirling with a different kind of programming language and encryption algorithms!  Obviously, the CEO decipher was "blablablabal ... ".  After the barrage of the pictures of the geeky CIO, a slew of smart speakers came to the defense of why "IT Matters"! Many years have passed since Nicolas Carr published this work and still IT is all worked up defending its value.  Then there were a slew of book and authors speaking on how the CIO preferably not know much about IT so they can run IT better!  And there were a slew of other books for the technical CIO's on how to re-program  their heads to speak business form the CEO can understand so they may be one day able to get a seat at the table.  The total sum of the speakers theme on the topic of CIO exclusion from the CEO table is that the head of the CIO needs to be re-programmed to speak a new language!  Not a programming language! But the language of the deal.   There were even slides that had a parallel set of geek speak mapped to CEO speak which really did not match! But I guess if you splash a set of geeky terms out there and map them to general business and marketing strategy taxonomy everything goes.

I personally find these presentations rather silly and shallow in their intellectual depth, honestly! Every CIO I worked with and observed has yet to use SOA, XML, or any of these terms in their strategic plans or in every meeting or message they give to their team.   What I have experienced thus far is CIO's who are very able and adept at talking about business value, finding means to improve cost cutting practices, applying technology to increase profit margins or reducing cost, tackling spiraling operational costs and improving efficiencies, systematically introducing operational excellence and standardizing processes, revitalizing customer service, and sustaining competitive differential through technology.   I am not sure which CIO's or CTO's these speakers are talking about and why do we continue to accept this self flagellationin IT.  Let us face it! how does any business run its business today without a solid technology backing that ensures the organization's security, network connectivity, operations processing, business intelligence and understanding of the market, collaboration within and outside the boundaries, innovation and delivery of new business models based on technology solutions and a whole list of capabilities that can only be delivered by the CIO! None.  IT does not only matter! IT is the core engine without which there would be no business running as we know it today.  And that my friends in IT, is the real deal.

Imagine for a minute a universe that is flat.  This universe is created in three dimensional images that we see and experience as if they are certain reality but in fact it is simply dimensions we experience in a specific moment in time.  Imagine a reality whose composition is created by an infinite number of probabilities constructed by the power of the collective.   Imagine such a reality is an expression of the collective choice we make every day but keep in mind such a reality is still one potential aspect or one fraction or one spec of light illumination of one given probability.   Plato talked about shadows and images long time ago.  I did not really understand him until I read about this potential holographic universe. 

The Holographic Principle outlines such a universe! This principle is a combination of quantum gravity and string theory where the description of space or volume is an information structure decoded as a reflection of a boundary to a region.  Take the holographic principle and apply it to the universe as if it is a two dimensional information structure reflecting off the cosmological horizon!  The reflection of the reality of this universee is determined based on probabilities.   Nothing is predetermined in such a world, and nothing is planned.  The universe is simply the reflection of the sum of probabilities chosen by our collective minds.   How we choose to shape it is a choice we make everyday.  But then again such a universee has no "days" ... it is a world where there is no time or space or mass.  These dimensions collapse in a holographic world.  Time as a measure of past, future, and present is happening at the same time.  What we see unfold before our own eyes is simply the reflection of our choices rendered holographically to us in the collective.

Initially, such theory and such ideas did not make much sense to me.  But if you think that life and the universe unfolds its reality based on choices we make would this not mean we are ultimately responsible for all the reflections we see in life.  Poverty, hunger, destruction, pollution, wars, and suffering pervade our lives and in the collective.   Is that a choice we have made? Can we choose to change life's miserable reflections and ultimately create a beautiful universe where peace and kindness paint a better place.  M-theory, string-theory, and the holographic principle ... say we possibly can.

The Thinking Man  hunches over in deep confusion! He contemplates the fatalistic hands of the destiny as he gazes into the hell of shallow applications!  They call them widgets  or webparts! They even call them facebook applications too! These little applications float around and you can publish them here and there and they can go anywhere! They can go on your blog, or on your applications, or on your social network, or even on your very own website!  They roam the Internet like wandering gypsies and make themselves welcome everywhere! They are shallow and have no roots and are multiplying everywhere.  They mash things up and leave you confused! Oh what happened to the labors of look and feel! Who owns what and how can we monitor or track! Publish and Subscribe! Syndicate or face doom!!!  The Thinking Man has completely lost control! 

Thinking man! do not despair!!! Shallow applications are the name of the game! Now is the time for you to go with the flow and contemplate a thinking widget, webpart, or a facebook application of your own.   

 

No! It is not the color or taste of their meat.  Pigs are committed and chicken are simply involved in SCRUM.  So here is the joke:

"A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?" The pig looks back at the chicken and says, "Good idea, what do you want to call it?" The chicken thinks about it and says, "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?" "I don't think so," says the pig, "I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved."

In SCRUM a pig puts his bacon on the line! A chicken is only merely involved.  Well, I do like SCRUM but this business of chicken and pig is really annoying to me!  It reeks of IT arrogance and it really explains why IT still does not get it.  The customer is not a chicken! And the product owner is not a pig.   And why for God sake do we even need to differentiate roles in agile software development based on these analogies.   The theory here is that the chicken (stakeholder or the customer) need to only be involved during sprint review!  And the pig (product owner or scrum master) is the one with the bacon on the line.  Do not get me wrong! I like SCRUM and I have been avid supporter of the approach.  But this business of pig and chicken to me is not only naive but also presumptive on IT's part. 

Customers are not chicken and product owners are not pigs! At the end of the day everyone involved or committed or merely is a part of the team on both sides in business and in IT is on the line for the service being published or consumed.   But human nature is always focused on drawing lines and boundaries and painting different colors to establish control mechanisms! I personally prefer to think of Tai Chi's push hands excercise or maybe Zen practice! 

Many of us in the Information Technology field are driven by a passionate obsession for innovation.  We experience technology transforming our lives.   Most of us are the invisible hands behind the realization of many of the new innovations that have truly changed not only our lives but also the way the world is communicating and living in and out of cyberspace.  I have not blogged in a while as I have found myself traveling into the past instead of the future in search of inspiration for innovation.  I find myself traveling in the past to glean how others in a world with no computers managed to change the world around them.   I wonder what was their secret! how did they manage without super computers, no Internet, no digital communication, skype, or facebook!  I also try to find what is in common between those who changed the past and those who are changing the present and future.  

I came across Gianlorenzo Bernini.  Many of you I am sure are familiar with his stunning work.  Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (1622 - 1625), Rape of Proserpine (1621 - 1622), David (1623 - 1624), and Ecstasy of St Theresa (1647 - 1652) all have one thing in common: an artist's passion for unfathomable innovation! Bernini did not only have a passion for innovation but also he had a streak for breaking the barriers of limitations.  His work is a snap shot of a moment in time where marble moves in a motion that brings passion to life.  A living stone speaks to us in a compellingly moving emotion captured in a snapshot.  The hands of Apollo sinking into Proserpine's thighs, St Theresa's scandalously partly opened lips,  and Daphne's hands turning to leaves in thin air are timeless testaments of his passion for innovation.  

Innovation is many things.  Bernini teaches us it is to think the unthinkable, to break the unbreakable, to dare the impossible and to demonstrate excellence.  Bernini proves to us in every line and motion in his works that innovation is unbridled passion for excellence.   Innovation is not simply solving problems in rational introspection at a measured pace.  It is the human ability to break new frontiers, to change the way things have been done for so many long years, to solve problems in completely different and new ways, and to shatter the barriers of limitation. 

I fear most often that the technologists of tomorrow have been castrated by the mundane and dull commercialization of IT.  I believe in IT that is daring, passionate, and willing to shatter the trite delegation of IT as something that does not matter or something that can be bought as a commodity.  Sure! Commodity art is all around with its dull and worn out ability to inspire to challenge our senses.  I dream of a new generation in IT that will bring forward the dare and confidence in our capabilities.  For those organizations that cut their IT R&D budgets, cut time and freedom for IT to explore the frontiers of the impossible, cut time and freedom for IT to make sense of a technology world that is exceeding business ability to fathom what can be made possible in a technology world that is moving at the speed of light,  I predict a dull and slow fall into oblivion.  The organization and technologists that will thrive, survive, and mark their impact on the world will embrace and celebrate a Bernini's type of IT with passion for innovation.  Please do not ask your technologist to make copies of IT art ... It is interesting to me because I often times find IT the reflection of its business culture and beliefs.  Bernini is a reflection of a patron who believed in the artist ability to rise above the level of expectations of medieval time limitations.       

 

I have recently just learned about a game called World of War Craft.   The game is very interesting with amazing ability to create different types of characters, to help you enter new worlds and face different creatures and fight many challenges.   My son plays this game and in record time he managed to bring up his virtual characters to level 42 overnight.  I am still struggling at level two as a human warrior and keep on running my character into walls and trees as she tries to forage in the jungle for food and stuff.   I find it difficult to memorize all the key board clicks and different combinations of keys I need to push together to make the human warrior move gracefully.  I think I like chess better but I will keep an eye on this very interesting game! My post today is not about World of War Craft.  It is about Multi-touch voice enabled screens!  I wrote earlier about applications that leverage visulization as a mode of expression and processing of information.  I was doing research on data visualization and of all places I found many amazing video clips on YouTube and this War Craft III crazy multi-touch screen shows you a glimpse into the future of application development that combines voice, touch, interactive processing of data.  Take a look at Microsoft Surface personalization and customization of snow board shopping demo.

We already see many consumer commercial grade high resolution, low cost, and scalable multi-touch, multi-sense surface technologies moving into main consumer market and new affordable options are being make available.  Listen to Jeff Han talk about how multi-touch screens will bring new ways of interaction with the machine! And do not laugh when you watch Johnee Lee show you how to make a cheap Wii enabled whiteboard at your home! I laughed really hard when I saw this demo to see the genius and see someone offer us a very cheap and really brilliant "do it yourself" low cost multi-touch, multi-sense whiteboard screen!  Now that is amazing low cast Innovation!  And you should try it too.

Soon we will be using commercial PC's with multi-touch screens that are voice enabled, touch keyboard interfaces, with multi-touch based interfaces.  With this type of surface PC, I think I will be able to keep up with my son's game and I will no longer have to memorize any short key cuts to advance my World of War Craft warrior at least to level three!      

Everything and nothing! Web 2.0 is not something you can "buy" or something you can "develop" so what is so bad about that! Nothing.   Web 2.0 is not a product nor is it a label.  It is more or less a phenomenon where new paradigms of information sharing focus on the inner ego of "me" millions of masses are eager to share over the Internet.  I am not an exception! I revel in sharing my kids photos, sharing my mood swings with my friends, sending them cards, writing on my friends' walls, and opening up an inner window into my own life through a facebook or a meetup site.  It is wonderful to say the least!  I have recently became more active using facebook as I post stuff and my friends comment on them, I find myself connecting with them more easily and in a busy life and hectic schedule it is a great way of staying connected and keeping in touch with your friends.  I just love it.   

So what is so bad about such applications considering they are the hottest killer apps on the Internet?  Well, in a nutshell, it is the hype that gives Web 2.0 a bad rap and the pressure for internal IT service provider to offer comparable products and services in corporate culture.  Such pressure is causing an artificial introduction of a cultural phenomenon to a corporate world that is not ready to internalize or absorb such applications.  The corporate cultures are not a swirling entropy of social exchange where social networking is the basic driver for linking and connecting.  Corporate cultures govern and structure modes of communications and methods of expression.  Corporate culture has a difficult time building the synergy that made Web 2.0 what it stands for today: a thriving and innovating medium for linking thoughts and ideas in full free form built all around "me" as an individual with my preferences, my likes and dislikes, my space that I can completely control, and my groups which I can construct and de-construct at the click of a few buttons.  Web 2.0 is a paradigm for building an experience where the user stands supreme and everything else orbits around the individual experience.  Corporate culture builds applications centered around the business and business processes and is focused on straight through processing (STP) or on automation or on massive processing of business intelligence to support business decisions.  Corporate culture and applications are not built based on my identity, likes, my dislikes, my favorite applications, or my list of buddies I like to keep track of as I socialize and make new friends in cyberspace. 

So what is bad about Web 2.0 in a corporate culture? Making Web 2.0 fit in a universe that is not centered around the user, user identity, and user experience leaves much to be desired.  What is bad about early introduction of Web 2.0 products is the wasteful hype investments.  Corporate users scratch their heads trying to figure how to leverage Web 2.0 to add business value in a structured ccorporate world and can not really figure out how to unleash its potential yet due to many ccorporate restrictions and lack of flexibility in changing business processes.  It is not a bad thing really to adopt Web 2.0 inside the walls of the corporate culture but to reap the benefits a parallel empowerment and enablement of the "individuals" to freely share information and discover new ways to do business is what will unleash the power of Web 2.0 inside the walls ... also a parallel new way of building and designing new system architectures and application services centered around the user experience, the user behavior, the user preference, the user identity, and overall user knowledge and potential is an absolute must inside the walls to make the Web 2.0 experience worth the investment.     

Who would have ever imagined Marry Cassatt would have had anything to do with IT! Not many.  Only recently I discovered a common link between Mary's spirit and the future of IT and it is not something many of us in IT dare to flaunt: the power of imagination.   Mary Cassatt is an American Impressionist who lived most of her life in France.  Mary demonstrated the spirit of infinite optimism, innovation, and ability to manage with very little resources and support.  Mary Cassatt teaches us that the IT that thrives and innovates today is one driven by vision and innovation as key to survival in a world lacking in technology research and development  (R&D) resources and support.  

Mary did not have much resources or support from her parents when she choose to become a painter. Mary's father was not supportive of her choice to become an artist! He insisted that she would be "self funded" on her own.  He was willing only to support her basic needs.  However, this lack of support did not stop her.   Mary became a rare female impressionist and a rare American artist as well as the only American artist to exhibit her work with the original group of impressionist Artists such as Degas, Monet, and Renoir.  She exhibited her work with Impressionists in 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1886.  What can we in IT learn from Mary? a lot.  I would posit that the first thing we can learn from Mary is that innovation and vision is a personal choice.  As an artist, she knew what she wanted to accomplish and what form of art she liked.  She did not have much support or resources but that challenge did not stop her. 

Many of us in IT can attest to the innovation challenge due to lack of resources to support technology research and development.  In the past ten years, IT R&D budgets have nearly come down to a halt.  Should IT stop innovating and just focus on cutting cost or just support basic business automation needs?  Mary's answer was a brilliant no!  Her answer is what we see today in her art, style, themes and spirit.  When it comes to technology innovation, IT must find a way despite the continued challenge many technologists face today where IT has become not necessarily the agent of change or transformation but a tool for cutting cost and a tool to support basic needs.  This means IT must manage more with less to transform itself from being the agent of basic needs to becoming the agent of beautiful transformation.